Aplus.NET Review on Website Hosting Services

Established as a subsidiary of Abacus America, Inc in 1992, it was not until 1998 that Aplus.NET began offering web hosting services. With the mission to provide reliable online hosting and marketing shop for small business, the company offers a wide range of products, including domain name registration, web hosting, web design, and online marketing.

According to the statistics on its official site, Aplus.NET possesses more than 250 employees worldwide, and has served more than 100,000 customers so far.

However, does that mean the web host is a good hosting option for your website? Instead of answering this question in haste, we are going to start the Aplus.NET review from both pro and con aspects based on affordability, feature, uptime, page loading speed, and customer service, to lift the veil of the truth.

Pros of Aplus.NET

Scaleable Hosting Packages

Aplus.NET launches 3 shared web hosting plans that are Basic, Business and Professional, all of which are allocated with unlimited FTP accounts and subdomains. However, each package also varies on the amount of some hosting resources so as to meet different hosting needs.

The detailed information is listed as follows.

Resources

Basic

Business

Professional

Hosted Domains

2

20

Unlimited

Disk Space

100 GB

300 GB

Unlimited

Monthly Data Transfer

500 GB

3000 GB

Unlimited

MySQL Databases

25

50

100

Email Addresses

5

250

500

Email Storage per Mailbox

2 GB

5 GB

5 GB

SSL Certificate

Price

$9.99/mo

$19.99/mo

$29.99/mo

Good Features

To make hosting more reliable and user-oriented, Aplus.NET offers many good features in all hosting plans. You can view the details in the following.

60-Day Free Trial

One considerate offer is the 60-day free trial, which helps get your hosting and business online without charge. In this condition, there’s enough time for you to test whether the hosting service offered by Aplus.NET is reliable or not, and decide whether to choose it or not.

Free Domain Name Registration

All Aplus.NET hosting plans come with a free domain for one year to help get your website started, which saves you totally $12.99. Good offer it may be, there’s still something to notice.

It only applies to new accounts and must be claimed within 30 days of account signup.

Cons of Aplus.NET

Not Budget-Friendly Hosting Prices

As we have mentioned, Aplus.NET offers 3 options for shared web hosting – Basic, Business and Professional. For each plan, there are two options of billing cycles, that is, monthly and yearly. Their prices start at $9.99/mo, $19.99/mo and $29.99/mo through monthly billing, while the prices are $7.99/mo,$15.99/mo and $23.99/mo via yearly billing.

When compared with some quality web hosting companies like BlueHost whose hosting services start at $2.95/mo through a beneficial promotion, the pricing level of Aplus.NET is higher.

Not Explicit Money Back Guarantee

To reassure customers, many web hosting companies offer refund guarantee for a certain amount of days ranging from 30 to 90. We also find a piece of information that mentions a 30-day money back guarantee on the official site of Aplus.NET.

However, there is no further or detailed explanation about this refund policy, so we are not clear whether full refund is available. By the way, there is no way for pro-rated refund.

Custom Control Panel

Unlike many reputable web hosts who utilize cPanel control panel, Aplus.NET provides the custom one, with which you can create a website, pay bills and seek for support all in one place. In short, you have the freedom to focus on your business, as well as innovate and improve your core business functions.

When compared with the most reputable and user-friendly cPanel which allows webmasters to manage almost every aspect of an account with ease, the custom control panel is not mature enough and more challenging to handle, especially for those who are not familiar with the new interface.

Awkward Uptime

At Aplus.NET, a 99.9% uptime is guaranteed. According to its Service Level Guarantee Policy, the figure 99.9% is averaged at least a period of three months instead of one month, and if the web hosting provider fails to meet the guarantee, customers are entitled to receive a credit of 10% – 50% of their monthly fees paid.

However, to make a claim due to failure on the guarantee, customers are required to apply for the credit within 60 days of the last day of the month, and there should be over 20% customers that have been affected because of the same issue.

So, what actually does Aplus.NET do in order to achieve a great uptime?

Aplus.NET utilizes state-of-the-art data centers located in Miami, Toronto and Dublin, all of which adopt highly reliable and premium technology providers.

Besides, the web host possesses multiple storage sub-systems that use Network Appliances, Blades (HP) and RAID4 to securely host customer websites. As for network, it applies core network that is built on Cisco 6500 switches using the latest Supervisor 720 engine.

To test how Aplus.NET performs, we have been hosting a website with it for a long time. According to the monitoring, though there is no big downtime, the web host fails to keep its promise sometimes.

Below is the uptime record captured in the last 30 days.

Slow Page Loading

During the period when we monitored the uptime, we also closely observed the server response time. According to the statistics, the average outcome is 1000ms. Such performance is not competitive when compared with some top web hosts like InMotion Hosting which takes an average of 237ms for server response.

Check the details of Aplus.NET server response in recent time.

How About the Technical Support?

Nowadays, great importance is attached to customer service in almost every walk of like, so it is the same with the web hosting field. Aplus.NET, one of the rapid-developing web hosting companies, has been also making continuous efforts to provide customers with quality support.

Advantage

Aplus.NET claims to offer technical support 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. With this web host, customers are allow to ask for help by submitting a ticket, chatting via live chat, or calling their support representatives through North American-based and toll-free phone number.

In addition, to help those who need to find solutions to some common issues, the company also comes with a FAQ section and works out a number of helpful articles. There are different categories of FAQs, including billing, coding/scripting, databases, DNS, domain, etc.

Disadvantage

Many web hosting providers additionally offer a knowledgebase that comes with a wide range of posts like tutorials, security updates and SEO tips, which help users a lot. However, no such offer is available with Aplus.NET.

Final Thought – Not to Try

Based on the in-depth review, you can find there are both merits and shortcomings of the hosting service offered by Aplus.NET. When thinking it over, for some essential aspects like price, uptime, server response and technical support, Aplus.NET fails to do a good job.

Therefore, we do not think this web host is a right hosting option for you. Instead, for budget-friendly and reliable web hosts, the following companies are what you can take into consideration.

I've been an experienced web developer, SEOer and technical writer since 2003. I worked in many international high-tech companies including Microsoft and Autodesk before 2012. Now I own a startup company in San Francisco, CA, focusing on developing websites and blogs to deliver exceptional results to global readers by leveraging the power of Internet.
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FTC Disclosure

We get commission from web hosting companies for referral and advertisement. However, this does not affect our unbiased web hosting reviews and insights. We never allow payments to influence our judgement. We always work hard and try our best to help people find the best cost effective web hosting deals at an affordable rate.